The Suitcases That Stayed Behind…..


For Armen Sayamyan, painting is not simply a profession. It is the language through which he remembers, mourns, preserves and continues to live.
Bor n and raised in Shushi, the historic city of Artsakh, Armen grew up surrounded by the landscapes, architecture, people and atmosphere that would later become central to his artistic world. His relationship with the city is not limited to geography. Shushi is woven into his childhood, his first memories, his formation as a person and his beginnings as an artist.


Today, his paintings carry that place within them.
Through color, abstraction and personal symbolism, Armen tries to preserve what war, displacement and time threaten to erase. His work speaks about culture, identity and belonging, but it also speaks about the private experiences behind those larger ideas: a childhood city, a family, a father, a house left behind, a suitcase packed under circumstances no one had imagined.


“I was born and raised in Artsakh, in the city of Shushi,” he says. “Shushi is not simply my birthplace. It is my childhood, my memories, my first steps as a person and as a painter. The nature of that city, its architecture, its people and its entire atmosphere had a great influence on my art.”
Armen began drawing when he was still very young, during his kindergarten years. At school, he attended an art group, continuing a fascination that had already begun at home. He was drawn to pencils, colors and anything that allowed him to make something with his own hands.
He played with colored plasticine and made small sculptures. He drew with pencils. He experimented without necessarily knowing that these early activities would eventually become the foundation of his life.


His mother was the first person to recognize the seriousness of that interest. She encouraged him to pursue art and believed that he could become a painter.
“That support was very important to me,” Armen says. “When there is someone beside a child who believes in their abilities, it can have a great significance for their entire life.”
After school, he continued his education at the Shushi State Humanitarian College named after Arsen Khachatryan, studying to become an artist and craftsman. He later continued at the State Institute named after Hakob Gyurjian.


His education was interrupted by another responsibility. From 2015 to 2017, he served in the Artsakh Defense Army and took part in the four-day April War. He received the “Best Soldier” commemorative medal.
Then came the war of 2020.
Until the final day, he and his father were involved in the fighting. The experience left an unavoidable mark on his way of thinking and on the work that followed. For Armen, art did not exist outside history. It absorbed the weight of what he had seen, what he had lost and what he could no longer return to.
The national and cultural themes in Sayamyan’s work are not abstract ideas separated from everyday life. They come from a personal connection to a place and from the need to keep that connection alive.
In his paintings, he tries to speak about the preservation and recognition of Armenian culture, as well as the preservation of Artsakh’s identity. He does this through his own colors, his own way of seeing and his personal aesthetic.
“I try to convey national ideas in my work,” he says. “I want to speak about preserving and recognizing our culture, and about preserving the identity of Artsakh.”


For Armen, artistic expression becomes a form of resistance, not necessarily resistance in the loud or political sense, but resistance through memory. A painting can hold what has been displaced. It can preserve an image, a feeling or a piece of identity when physical places are no longer accessible.
“I believe that if each of us holds on to our identity through our art and preserves it, then we cannot be defeated,” he says.
The statement is not delivered as a slogan. It emerges from experience. Armen has seen what it means to lose a home and to be forced away from the landscape that shaped him. His paintings therefore carry a particular urgency. They are not only images. They are acts of remembrance.
When Armen paints, he says he gives himself over to his emotions and imagination. At those moments, it is as if his inner world begins to speak.


Music plays an important part in that process. He mostly listens to jazz while working, allowing its rhythm and atmosphere to influence the mood of his paintings. For him, music can become the emotional space from which colors and images emerge.
“I often listen to jazz,” he says. “Sometimes a melody becomes the mood from which the colors and images are born.”


That relationship between sound and color is reflected in the emotional quality of his work. His paintings are not always built around a clearly defined story. Some begin with a feeling, an internal image or a movement of color. Others emerge from memories that may not immediately announce themselves.
Armen does not always begin with a complete explanation of what he wants to say. Sometimes the meaning becomes clearer only later, after the work is finished or after life gives the image a new context.
One of his most meaningful paintings began with a simple image: a suitcase.
Before the 2020 war, Armen started working on a canvas featuring a suitcase. At the time, he did not know why he had chosen that object. He did not understand what feeling had led him toward it. He painted the suitcase in bright, colorful tones.
A few days later, the war began.
Afterward, the painting became deeply symbolic. The suitcases remained, while Armen and others were forced to leave their homes.


“I didn’t know why I was painting a suitcase,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what feeling was guiding me at that moment. I painted it in a colorful way. Then, a few days later, the war began.”
The image became difficult to separate from the experience that followed. A suitcase is an ordinary object, but in the context of displacement it becomes something else: a container for a life that must be reduced to what can be carried. It suggests departure, uncertainty and the sudden collapse of the assumption that one will be able to remain at home.
“The suitcases stayed, and we were forced to leave our home,” he says.


There was another painting, made in abstract red tones. In it, the colors seemed to resemble trees, but also burning trees. Again, Armen had not consciously painted a prediction. Yet after the war, the work took on a different meaning.
“I don’t know whether it was simply a coincidence or whether my inner feeling was expressing itself in some way,” he says. “But today those works are not simply paintings for me.”
They have become records of a moment that the artist sensed before he could explain it. Their meaning lies not only in the colors on the canvas, but in what happened afterward.
After leaving Artsakh, Armen and his family moved to Gyumri. Life there was difficult. They lived in a small house, without the conditions he had needed in order to work comfortably.
Yet there was a piano in the house.
In the absence of a proper studio or easel, the piano became his working surface. It became his makeshift easel, the place where his first post-war paintings were created.
The image is both modest and powerful: an artist trying to return to his work in a small home, using the top of a piano because there is nowhere else to place his paintings. The circumstances were far from ideal, but they did not end his creative life.
“That piano became my easel,” Armen says. “My first paintings after the war were created on it.”


The experience changed his understanding of what it means to continue. He realized that when a person truly wants to create, even the most difficult conditions cannot completely stop them.
He describes that period as a lesson in patience and perseverance. He also sees it through faith, saying that God allowed him to paint again.
The paintings created during that time were born out of limitation, but limitation did not erase their value. If anything, it made the act of painting more immediate. The work was no longer dependent on ideal surroundings. It became something that could happen wherever there was enough space to place a canvas and enough strength to begin.
Armen does not describe painting as a hobby or even simply as employment. It is, in his words, a way of life.
“I cannot imagine myself without it,” he says.


Painting allows him to express what he cannot always communicate through words. It gives form to emotions that may otherwise remain unspoken. It is also a way to find inner calm.
A canvas can hold pain, joy, memory and longing. It can absorb feelings that are too complicated to explain directly. This is especially important for an artist whose personal history is tied to war and displacement.
“Sometimes a painting becomes the place where I can leave my pain, my joy, my memories and my longing,” he says.
That idea helps explain why his work is so closely connected to his past. For Armen, remembering is not a passive act. It requires attention. It requires returning to images, colors and sensations that might otherwise disappear.
Painting allows him to remain in conversation with the places and people who shaped him, even when physical distance has made that connection more difficult.
There are days when Armen does not paint. He may not feel inspired, or he may simply not want to pick up a brush.

But even then, he does not consider himself disconnected from art.
He reads, watches an interesting film, walks or makes small sketches. These activities help him find his way back to the creative process. For him, inspiration does not always arrive as a sudden revelation. Sometimes it is collected slowly through observation and reflection.
“I think that even when a painter does not have a brush in hand, they continue to observe, think and gather the feelings that may later become a painting,” he says.


The idea is central to his understanding of artistic work. Creation does not begin and end at the moment a brush touches the canvas. It also takes place in silence, during walks, while listening to music, while remembering or simply noticing the world.
An artist may appear to be doing nothing, but internally the process can continue. Images accumulate. Emotions take shape. A color or form may return repeatedly until it finally finds a place in a painting.
Armen says he is always pleased when people stop in front of his paintings, look at them, offer an opinion or share what they feel.
The response of viewers matters to him because it gives the work a life beyond the studio. A painting may begin with one intention, but it can be received in an entirely different way.
“You can paint one thing, but a person may see a completely different story or feeling in it,” he says. “That is beautiful, because art begins to live inside the viewer as well.”

For Armen, that does not mean the artist loses control of the work. Rather, the painting becomes larger than the original intention. It enters another person’s memory and experience. The viewer brings their own history to the image.
A red shape may remind one person of fire and another of flowers. A suitcase may suggest travel to one viewer and forced departure to another. An abstract landscape may become a childhood place in someone else’s mind.
That openness is part of what makes painting meaningful to him. The work remains personal, but it is not closed.
When asked what matters most for an artist, talent, hard work, courage or finding one’s own voice, Armen does not choose one over the others.
He believes all of them are important.
Talent must be developed through discipline. Courage is necessary because an artist must be willing to follow a personal path, even when that path is uncertain. An individual voice cannot be found without the willingness to keep working and to accept that recognition may not come immediately.


“If a person has a gift, they must shape and develop it through hard work,” he says. “They must also be courageous and not be afraid of their own path.”


He does not treat success as something that can be forced. Recognition and progress may arrive in their own time. The essential thing is to continue creating and to keep developing.
That belief also reflects his own experience. His path has included education, military service, war, displacement and the rebuilding of a creative life under difficult conditions. None of those experiences followed a simple artistic plan. Yet each became part of the person and artist he is now.


To young people who want to draw or paint but are afraid of criticism, he offers direct advice which is listen to your inner voice and continue if you truly love it.


Armen does not suggest ignoring other people entirely. Criticism can be useful, and artists can learn from those around them. But listening must not become surrendering one’s own identity.
“Do not be afraid of people’s opinions or criticism,” he says. “Of course, you should listen to others and learn from them, but you should not lose your own voice.”


For Armen, painting is freedom. An artist must be able to protect that freedom while continuing to grow.
His message extends beyond painting. He tells young people who are still searching for their direction to do what they genuinely love and to do it with care and commitment.
“That is how sincerity is born,” he says. “And individuality comes from sincerity.”
He also understands that many young people are frightened by uncertainty. They may not know where a particular road will lead. They may worry that the path will be difficult or that their efforts will not be recognized.


Armen’s own life gives weight to his answer. A path does not always reveal its destination at the beginning. Sometimes it becomes visible only through movement.


“Do not be afraid that the road is difficult or that you still do not know where it will take you,” he says. “When a person finds themselves in their work, the road gradually begins to open.”
Armen’s paintings come from a personal history, but they carry a broader emotional reality. They speak to anyone who has had to leave a home, preserve a memory or rebuild a life after loss.
His work is rooted in Shushi and Artsakh, yet it is not confined to one place. The themes of displacement, identity and longing can be understood by people far beyond the landscape that first gave rise to them
Still, the center of his art remains clear. He is trying to hold on to something.
Sometimes that something is a childhood street, a building, a color or the atmosphere of a city. Sometimes it is a cultural identity. Sometimes it is the feeling of home itself.
And sometimes it is a suitcase, painted brightly before its meaning becomes clear.
The suitcase remains on the canvas. The piano remains in the small house in Gyumri. The memories remain in the artist’s colors. Through painting, Armen continues to give them a place to exist.

For Armen, creating is a way of refusing disappearance. It is a way of saying that a place can be taken from a person, but it cannot be erased so easily from memory. A home can be left behind, but it can continue to live through stories, music, images and art.
That is the role Armen has chosen for himself which is to paint what he remembers, what he feels and what he fears may be forgotten.